Update 2023: This tool no longer exists. Try some alternative such as this one.
This article covers a free Sendy alternative to send email newsletters via Amazon SES. Amazon SES (Simple Email Service) is a cloud-based email sending service. The price of Amazon SES is a fraction of what other email campaign services charges and that’s why it is popular among the digital marketers and developers. The problem with Amazon SES is its interface that offers a console-like UI with no good options for email campaigns and that’s where services like Sendy come into action.
Sendy is a self-hosted email newsletter application that provides a user-friendly interface for Amazon SES. This application lets you take advantage of Amazon SES with an email campaign friendly interface. But Sendy is a paid application, and you have to host it yourself.
MuxEmail is a free alternative to Sendy that you can use to send email newsletters via Amazon SES. It doesn’t pack as many features as Sendy but it’s free for 25,000 emails and you don’t have to host anything; it’s a web app. All you have to do is connect your Amazon SES account to MuxEmail and then you can create your email campaign with a drag and drop email builder with HTML support. You can save email templates, schedule email campaigns and get reports.
Also read: Find Newsletters of Popular Companies with HTML Code
Free Sendy Alternative with to Send Email Newsletters
In order to get started with MuxEmail, first, you have to create an account. After verifying your email address, you can access the MuxEmail interface which has the following sections:
- Audience: In this section, you can create groups and add your audience.
- Campaigns: This section is for creating and scheduling email campaigns by selecting the respective audience.
- Templates: This section lists all your saved email templates.
- AWS Configuration: In this section, you can configure and access your Amazon SES account.
Configure Amazon SES
The first thing you have to do after logging in to MuxEmail is configuring your Amazon SES account. When you go to the configuration section, it shows you a step-by-step guide to configure Amazon SES for existing as well as for a new account. Follow the guide to get ‘Access Key ID’ and ‘Secret Access Key’ from Amazon SES and add those details to MuxEmail to complete the configuration.
Create Audience
After configuring the Amazon SES into MuxEmail, create your audience. You can create groups and add contacts manually or import from a CSV file. The groups come handy to organize the audience as per your requirements. Do note that, in order to send emails to contacts outside of your Amazon SES (unverified identities), your account must be out of Amazon SES sandbox.
Email Editor (Templates)
Before creating a campaign, you can create your campaign email and save it as a template. You can do also do this while create a campaign as well. MuxEmail features a drag and drop editor and an HTML editor to design the email template. If you have an HTML email template, you can directly paste that in the HTML editor. But if you want to create a new template, you can use the drag and drop editor where you can design the template with various types of content, blocks, and formatting options.
Create an Email Campaign
Once you have your audience and template ready, you can move to the ‘Campaigns’ section and create a new email campaign. The first step is to add campaign details where you can specify the email subject, sender info, etc. After that, you can compose a new email or pick a saved template. In the next step, you can select an audience for the campaign and schedule it to the desired date.
After sending an email campaign, you can track the report in the ‘Campaigns’ section. It shows you the total number of subscribers, opens, clicks, bounces, and unsubscribes.
Wrap Up
MuxEmail is a handy email marketing service that lets you send email newsletters via Amazon SES. It is really simple to configure and allows you to create an email from scratch using HTML or drag and drop builder with campaign scheduling. The reports give you insight into your campaigns with enough details. At the end of the day, MuxEmail has the potential to be your default email campaign service where you don’t have to pay anything if you already have Amazon SES.
